August102013

A highly convincing scenario: the US computer is conspiring with its
partner unit from the Soviet side: both merge and blackmail the leaders
of the world: whatever you will do against our common super brain, will
be punished - no chance just to switch off the energy supply, or to
betray cunningly the system; what's against its optimised intentions
will be immediately detected, advised by its interface to be corrected,
even with merciless instructions to kill people without delay, in case
they conspired against it - otherwise its lethal menaces for the society
as a whole are increasingly worse; consequently it controls also the
decisions what locations as nuclear targets are to become part of the
programme (international urban centres) - the political message for our
days is incredible challenging, for the closed system is de facto
reality by the leading political and financial-economic unit of
corresponding interests against the people's constitutional guaranteed
rights and the states' sovereignty; the traditional executive, judicial
and
legislative powers are no longer under control by the state's sovereign,
the people, but have shifted to the leading function of the executive;
the legislative and judicial powers remain
obliged to follow the interests of the unit, which seizes by this all
executive power and the world's digitised capacities to blackmail
every state, administrative or economic organisation and individuum in every aspect of its existence; the menace via the executive
power threatens self-evidently also the legislative and judicial powers
in case they wouldn't apply to the demands of the unit. This is the most
striking lesson coming out of this picture - it explains very well the
systemic motivation behind the still growing right wing ideology,
privatized police, militia and mercenary business. A further lesson is
the replacement of human deciders by algorithms as one step further
towards a
digitised totalitarian grip of a new kind of dictatorship: a
21st century cyber neo-fascism with data-colonial governance by mass
surveillance meta-data, insurance and income patterns as socio-psychological
catalysts of classification and segregation : whoever wouldn't fit
into the given categories is politically a potential threat - whether
you will then be psychologically stigmatized as an incalculable risk for
your family and your neighbourhood, your car will be manipulated, or a
drone will be sent, this may be considered mainly as a question of your social status
and of some more sophisticated circumstances, but science and technical
progress are to be suspected completely under the top down line in the
digitised and hierarchical means of an anonymised and blindly
operating executive.

August082013

http://www.democracynow.org
- Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman recently spoke with Chilean
economist Manfred Max-Neef about Ed Snowden, when he was still in the
Russian airport. This interview took place in Bogotá, Colombia, at a
gathering of Latin American Right Livelihood laureates, often referred
to as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: In this
meeting, we produced a declaration about this thing, about what happened
to President Evo Morales, which we consider is an unbelievable and
unacceptable abuse in terms of international law. And we also stated
that we are appalled by the incredible cynicism of practically all the
countries in the world vis-à-vis what this young man has done,
sacrificing his life and his future for something in which he believed.
If you analyze what Snowden did and then read the Declaration of
Independence of the United States, and what that young man did is
exactly, exactly, exactly what Thomas Jefferson said that an American
citizen should do if a government, you know, does the kind of things
that have been discovered now.

I am appalled, you know, that
nobody in the world is stretching their hands to this young man.
Particularly, you realize, the European Union announced that they are
furious with the United States, you know, for the things that the States
has been doing—spying on them, you know, as in the days of the Cold
War. They are furious against it. Why are they furious? Because of
something that this young man revealed. But nobody stretches a hand to
this young man. They use the information that he gave in order to be
furious with the United States government, but they forget about the
person, the human being who sacrificed himself to do it. I am
really—think that this is a Greek tragedy, no? Really a Greek tragedy.
And I'm deeply disappointed, you know, even with my country, with my
president, who opposed that the foreign ministers of Latin America
should get together in order to discuss and take a decision about what
happened to President Evo Morales. Chile and Colombia were against the
initiative. And I am ashamed, you know, of my own government to have an
attitude like that. So I am really sorry, and I would love to be able to
give a hug to this brave young man.

February272013

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance activities through three case studies involving past global communications censorship and information conflicts—telegraph cable cutting and suppression, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking—and the world community's response to these conflicts. More on this event here: cyber.law.harvard.edu

Every Tuesday, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosts a public lunch gathering in our conference room in Boston. Each session involves a short presentation by a guest speaker or one of our community members, talking about a challenge that emerges from his or her current work. We are excited to partner with Global Voices to bring these presentations to a wider audience.

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. This talk will examine more closely some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance activities through three case studies involving past global communications censorship and information conflicts— telegraph cable cutting and suppression, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking— and the world community’s response to these conflicts. In addition to illustrating some of the legal, political, and security concerns that have animated historical instances of global communications censorship, the talk will aim to extrapolate lessons and insights for Internet censorship (and its resistance) today, such as the legality of censorship and its circumvention, the effectiveness of monitoring efforts, and the role of international institutions in disrupting (or facilitating) communications.

About Jon

Jon is a lawyer, Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab / Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and a doctoral student in information communication sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where his interdisciplinary research explores regulatory chilling effects online.

In 2011, he was a Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab–where he helped lead the ONI Transparency Project while contributing to projects like the Information Warfare Monitor–and, at Oxford, was Project Coordinator for the Privacy Value Networks Project, a large scale EPSRC funded research project on data privacy. A native Nova Scotian and graduate of Dalhousie University, he studied at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and Oxford as a Mackenzie King Scholar, where he was Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal. He has also worked as a federal attorney, policy advisor, and taught law at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

His research interests include constitutional/human rights law, intellectual property, and digital media policy & culture, particularly where these areas intersect with censorship, privacy, and security.

February262013

Scientists have known about these ridiculously energetic and high-velocity particles for nearly a hundred years. In daily life, cosmic rays may be familiar as the source of extra radiation airline passengers are exposed to. However scientists have been uncertain about where cosmic rays come from. The extreme conditions of temperature and speed that accompany supernovae and their remains made them a natural starting point for guesses. Now two separate Science papers finally provide evidence that cosmic rays do indeed come from supernovae remnants.